Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Hudson Hack Bangs The Iran War Drum, Forgets To Check A Map

By Steve Hynd


The neocon Hudson Institute's Anna Mahjar-Barducci has a particularly lurid account of Teh Threat from Iran to the Continental U.S.A. today - supposedly thanks to some help from Chavez in building a forward missile base in Venezuela.


Oh noes!!!!eleventy!!!1


The trouble is, even if it were all true - and she's basing it entirely off a single report in Germany's Die Welt newspaper which itself is partially sourced from a paper out of the necon American Enterprise Institute - the distances don't add up to a direct missile threat to the U.S.


It's about 2,200 KM from venezuela to Florida and about 3,800 to Texas. The Iranian Shabab-3 missile only has a maximum range of 1,500km.


The Hudson shill mentions an IISS study which talks about an "already existing solid-fuel, medium-range missile that can carry a nuke to hit regional targets" (her words, not those of the IISS) with a longer range. However, a quick look at the IISS piece shows it is entirely based upon a N.Y. Times report which has already been discredited - those missiles don't actually exist.


Ms Mahjar-Barducci is from Morocco and seems to have suddenly morphed from a regional expert on Northern Africa and the Middle east to a regional expert on Latin America sometime in March. Perhaps she should have stuck with her old beat - or at least consulted one of the many online "distance checkers" and some online sources before getting in such a tizzy.


Even so, the right wing continues to eat this stuff up without doing any fact-checking itself.



Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

2 comments:

  1. McQDecember 9, 2010 at 6:58 AM

    It is 1881 km to Key West from Venezuela and the Iranian Ghadr-110 medium range ballistic missile (nothing says it has to be the Shahab 3) has a range of 2,500 to 3,000 km.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve HyndDecember 9, 2010 at 8:16 AM

    Hi McQ,
    That's a wild over-estimate. The Iranians themselves cite a range of 1800km for the Ghadr-110, without payload, and most experts agree with that. It's max range fully laden is only 1300km.
    Oh, and did you notice ground isn't even reportedly broken on this base yet? Die Welt's report, even if true, says construction won't even begin until well into 2011.
    Regards, Steve

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)